Grant, can you expand on what you mean by this a bit? It was kind of just ‘out there’ without any contextual clues, and frankly I don’t want to misunderstand your point before I go incorporating it into my thought process.

Thanks.

I think this is a vastly unexamined aspect of modern life. Growing up on 50s TV, my male role models included men similar and different from those I knew personally. While I “knew” that Ralph Cramden and Desi Arnaz were “fictitious” (actually, Desi was the real Desi playing a fake Desi) their way of being-husbands became part of my understanding of marital relationships. Their particular styles of “ineffectuality” (lovably, “blusterably” unaware of the realities going on around them, in relationships with women who played along with them while winking knowingly at the audience) resonated with some of what I saw in my family and became part of an assumption set that took me years to recognize, examine and change.

The thing is, it’s very difficult to become aware of all tentacles of the roots of “myself,” and Hollywood and TV certainly have played a significant role in defining millions of selves over the past 80+ years.

Readable and compassionate (now there’s a combo infrequent in pomo-savvy discourse.) Somewhere in the Jungian literature is the idea that really big celebrities submit to the archetypal burden of our scrutiny and fantasy, that Marilyn Monroe really did die for our sins.

My dis-favorite iteration of the Whipping Person is Martha Stewart. The criticism of her is mostly reducible to “how viewing her makes me feel.” Well, so, just fold the *$&#^% napkins and arrange the flowers, or not. Whether seeing her picture salvages my self-regard is not a matter for a sealed indictment. I suspect our relationship to celebrities is coded in a part of the brain that also houses representations of family and tribe. It would explain a lot.

And Reuters = Too Hip for The Room. Priceless.

Celebrity culture: muddles in the models “Wolff made a couple of brilliant points last night, including the very sensible observation that the celebrity culture supplies stories that have the virtue of being both deeply interesting and free.” Free, yes…